Las Urbanistas

The construction cranes that are roosting all over downtown these days are one thing. But the real hints that the neighborhood is changing come in more subtle forms — such as the tours Derrick Moore has been giving around downtown recently.

Moore, a senior associate in CB Richard Ellis’ Urban Development Group, has been helping representatives from national chain stores such as Walgreen’s and the Outback Steakhouse group — who have long shied away from downtown — search for properties in the area. He has wined and dined potential retailers at local hotspots — and found their reaction a distinct shift from even a few months ago, when most took a wait-and-see attitude toward the neighborhood.

What has changed, downtown backers say, is how the burgeoning neighborhood is being perceived. After years of being not quite there, retailers seem to think that the area has reached — or is near reaching — a tipping point.

Residents have moved in, with the population now at 30,000. Some of downtown’s long-anticipated, large-scale projects — including a supermarket and a movie theater — are only months from opening.

It’s this trend that is behind much of the debate over the city’s proposal to sell the air rights above the Los Angeles Convention Center, allowing developers to build larger and denser residential buildings downtown.

Because the Convention Center was originally zoned for towers, the city wants to sell the unused airspace as a way of boosting development elsewhere in downtown beyond what current zoning laws allow.

Backers argue that selling air rights would boost downtown’s residential population even more. The more residents downtown can lure, the thinking goes, the larger the market for upscale retail. Until now, retail development has lagged behind residential development, with some merchants waiting to see whether the downtown boom is for real.

Questions about downtown’s future have heightened with the recent cooling of Southern California’s real estate market. But downtown so far doesn’t appear to be suffering much, and there are growing signs that retail is actually strengthening.

Bars and restaurants are opening at a fast clip in the area, and big-name chefs are signing leases on spaces downtown — especially along a stretch of 7th Street that has been the symbol of downtown’s tangled history as a retail destination.

Retail sales in downtown ZIP Codes have been rising steadily since the late 1990s, according to the California Board of Equalization. In fiscal year 2005-06, the last year for which statistics are available, retail sales totaled $1.7 billion — up 7% from the year before.

Still, there are concerns about how the downtown area will do on weekends and evenings, the make-or-break time for many of the new businesses. Parking and transportation around the urban center also could become concerns, because many of the lots used by businesses are unavailable or could be too pricey for evening and weekend use.

And many say the area cannot reach its full potential until certain neighborhood amenities are in place.

“You are at a point where there’s a critical mass down here now, in terms of the residential component,” said Andrew Myron, owner of the Edison club and lounge. “You are going to reach a point where more people won’t move downtown unless you have the amenities downtown.”

In the decades before World War II, downtown was a retail destination. But after World War II, the rise of the suburbs — and the shopping malls that came with them — began the steep decline of downtown’s retail core.

Though downtown continued to be a destination for office workers, the area had little success as a retail center. And even after the passage several years ago of an ordinance that enabled developers to convert long-vacant historic buildings into residential loft spaces, retail continued to falter.

Downtown leaders at the time decided to concentrate on bringing housing to the area first, figuring that retail might follow the new residents. And it did, to a point. Bars and art galleries began to dot the neighborhood.

Those businesses, developer and entrepreneur Cedd Moses said, “were the first people willing to take a chance. I think restaurants have a much tougher business model. It’s harder for them to survive than a bar or art gallery; the overhead is substantially higher.”

The historical conversions, along with the construction of several residential high-rises, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Walt Disney Concert Hall and two mega-projects in the works — L.A. Live near Staples Center and Grand Avenue on Bunker Hill — have meant that “the world has changed,” said Hal Bastian, senior vice president and director of economic development for the Downtown L.A. Business Improvement District.

According to Bastian’s group, there are nearly 30,000 people living downtown — up sharply from just a few years ago. With 7,500 units under construction, the downtown population could rise to more than 40,000 by the end of next year.

Many new downtown residents are young with a lot of disposable income, according to the recent survey. And many are college students — a particularly desirable demographic for retailers, several analysts said.

Bastian said he can barely keep up with the interest in downtown. Much of his work centers around efforts to create an active nightlife along 7th Street, modeled after the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Old Pasadena and Memphis’ Beale Street.

Several prominent L.A. restaurants, including Chaya Brasserie, have signed on to open eateries along 7th Street. Peet’s Coffee & Tea and Caffe Primo also have scouted the area.

Moses, who opened the Golden Gopher and Broadway Bar, two popular downtown nightspots, is involved in several new projects downtown, including a bar and a French brasserie along 7th.

The 7th Street effort represents just one part of what’s going on downtown, said Bert Green, a downtown resident and the owner of Bert Green Fine Art at 5th and Main streets. “Downtown is no longer one concept,” he said. “It has changed; it has become a series of mini- or micro-neighborhoods.”

What that means, Green said, is that the kind of retail that is appropriate in, say, South Park, near the Staples Center, differs from what might be found in Little Tokyo or the Fashion District.

But Green said the Historic District, where his gallery is located, remains a “tough nut” for retail. “It’s still not seeing the kind of interest from outside that all of those areas are seeing,” he said.

One key test for downtown will be the role that parking plays in its evolution. Several observers said it is hard to find inexpensive, easy parking in the district — and that could harm the push for an active street life in downtown.

“First and foremost,” Moore said, “we have to figure out the parking issue in downtown. We have to make parking easy for all the folks we are expecting to attract … for a reasonable amount of money.”

But also, they say, downtown is still waiting for what Jack Kyser, senior vice president and chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., calls an “aha store: a store that everybody says, ‘Oh my God, they are going there.’ “

One possibility for that store, Kyser said, is the Ralphs Fresh Fare that will open downtown in June.

The area has long been without a supermarket, and the arrival of Ralphs — which started downtown at 6th and Spring in the late 1800s but abandoned the district in 1950 — is seen by many as a sign that the district’s fortunes have returned.

“I think that the Ralphs opening is going to be the adhesive to hold it all together,” Moore said of the retail renaissance. “That’s what’s missing.”

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cara.dimassa@latimes.com

WHEN Elizabeth and Mordechai Kubany bought their house in Maplewood, N.J., eight years ago, its attic was dark and forbidding. “It was just a storage space,” Ms. Kubany said, “but it had the ceiling of a cathedral. You could sense that the potential was enormous.”

Now that space is a light-filled, 45-foot-long master bedroom suite with a glass-enclosed shower big enough for a family — a space more suggestive of a New York City loft than the attic of a stately brick house not far from the Garden State Parkway.

“You move to the suburbs mostly for your kids,” said Ms. Kubany, the mother of Lily, 4, and Benjamin, 7, who lived with her husband in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, before the children were born. The attic, recently renovated by Markus Dochantschi, a New York architect, is “a little bit of rebellion against the suburban aesthetic,” she said.

Though attic renovations are nothing new, until recently they tended to involve hiding pipes, rafters and ductwork with Sheetrock or knotty-pine paneling, and learning to love the awkward spaces that were left.

But that was before architecture stars like Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry popularized an aesthetic that involves translucent surfaces and jutting angles. For homeowners who like that look, the attic can be an ideal place to create architectural drama.

The Kubanys’ Maplewood house has four bedrooms, all on the second floor and all in the old-fashioned style of the 1934 house. But the attic, a raw space isolated from the rest of the house, offered a chance to try something different.

“Connecting it to the rest of the house through the architectural vocabulary didn’t seem crucial with the attic,” said Ms. Kubany, a public relations consultant for architects.

Mr. Dochantschi, the principal of the small firm studioMDA, agreed. And having spent seven years working for Ms. Hadid, he was primed to think of the structural oddities of an attic, particularly the angles formed by the roof, as elements to make the most of. “The thing that can work against you can also work for you,” he said.

Taking advantage of the space’s openness — the attic is the one floor of the house that isn’t interrupted by load-bearing walls — he rebuilt it as a single large room with a bed at one end and a bathroom at the other.

New oak floorboards run the 45-foot length of the room, accentuating its sweep, along with a row of relatively shallow cabinets, which take the place of more intrusive closets. A large glass shower stall, backed by a wall of brown marble, juts into the center.

The Kubanys would not reveal the cost of their renovation, except to say that it was little more than the cost of a large bathroom renovation, and “a tiny fraction” of what Mike Angelovich spent to transform his attic in Austin, Tex. That project cost $500,000, said Mr. Angelovich, a trial lawyer, and gave his family an additional 1,000 square feet of living space.

Mr. Angelovich saw the renovation as a way to make the most of a less-than-perfect house. He had always wanted to live on Lake Austin, he said, where waterfront houses, which are close to the city center, cost $2 million and up.

“In this location, you don’t always get the home you want,” he said. “You look for the lot you want, and do what you can with it.”

So when he found a house with 180 feet of lake frontage, Mr. Angelovich bought it, even though its vaguely colonial, 1980s architecture didn’t appeal to him. He thought of tearing down the house and starting over. But that was before he saw the potential of the attic, which contained two tiny bedrooms and more than 1,000 square feet of raw storage space.

Unlike the Kubanys, who turned their attic into an adult playground, Mr. Angelovich and his wife decided to cede theirs to their daughter, Arielle, 17, and son, Aidan, 11.

After seeing a project by Calvin Chen and Thomas Bercy, the principals of the Bercy Chen Studio in Austin, in a magazine, he hired them to create a kind of children’s domain. Two bedrooms, both of which open onto a new roof deck, are just the beginning.

Next to Aidan’s bedroom is a playroom, “a place for him to get rambunctious with his friends,” Mr. Angelovich said. The room includes a climbing wall, rising about 12 feet to the peak of the house. A secret passage from the playroom leads to the bunk bed in Aidan’s bedroom.

At the other end of the attic is Arielle’s hideaway, an ellipse with a curved banquette set into a wall covered in a 360-degree photograph of Yosemite National Park. One section of the mural conceals a pair of touch-latch doors that open to reveal a large-screen television.

Between them is a common area where the children do their homework. Mr. Angelovich describes it as “a living room for the upstairs.” Its floors, walls and ceilings are sheathed in massaranduba, a Brazilian hardwood that remains unscathed even under heavy use.

Interrupting the swaths of this wood are the building’s dormers, which the architects rebuilt, replacing what Mr. Chen calls “gingerbread house windows” with large sheets of insulated glass. Inside, the dormers are sheathed in backlit translucent acrylic panels, some white, some red. The dormers contain mattresses, which can be used as either window seats or guest beds.

Acrylic is also used for storage niches, mounted in the massaranduba walls, and for steel-framed doors that open to reveal the children’s quarters at opposite ends of the attic. The material reflects the dappled light that bounces off Lake Austin, which is about 50 feet away. The idea, Mr. Chen said, is to “treat architectural elements as minimalist art installations that interact with nature.”

To make it easy to keep the attic at a comfortable temperature, Mr. Angelovich used a form of insulation called Icynene that expands to fill building cavities, reaching as much as 60 times its original volume in eight seconds. (Icynene starts as a liquid, but quickly takes on the consistency of angel food cake.) Though it costs about three times as much as the more common pink fiberglass insulation, Icynene is said to be more effective. It is easier to install in tight spaces like those behind the attic’s acrylic panels, because it adapts to any shape.

Now Mr. Angelovich is renovating the ground floor of his house, which means he’ll also be living in the attic for a while. It’s not a hardship.

“People respond very emotionally to the attic,” he said. “Some people say it reminds them of the interior of a very nice yacht. To others, it has a cathedral-like quality.” Either way, he said, “It’s all very exciting.”

Proposed CCSF high-rise near Portsmouth Square concerns neighborhood

Tanya Schevitz, Chronicle Staff Writer; Thursday, March 29, 2007

Backers of a proposed community college building in San Francisco’s Chinatown say the flowing glass tower will be imbued with feng shui — the ancient Chinese concept that the placement of things brings balance to their surroundings and promotes prosperity, health and happiness.

But some residents and merchants say City College of San Francisco’s new building is a 17-story, 253-foot “monstrosity” that would loom over Portsmouth Square — and has already created negative feng shui.

“The objective of feng shui is to achieve harmony with the environment,” said Albert Cheng, a community leader and strong opponent of the proposal. “The whole fact that this proposal has created such a disturbance is a sign that it is not good feng shui. It is really historically, architecturally, esthetically incompatible with the neighborhood.”

Many thought the college planned to build a low-rise campus in Chinatown and were stunned in October when plans were unveiled for a 17-story glass and steel structure at Kearny and Washington streets.

According to City College Chancellor Philip Day Jr., the vertical design is needed to accommodate the classrooms, a library and support services for about 6,500 students at the satellite campus.

Now, the $122 million project is caught in a cross fire of controversy, with allegations that Justice Investors, which owns the neighboring 27-story Hilton Hotel, is fanning the opposition because the hotel would lose its views of San Francisco Bay.

Publicist Sam Singer, who is representing Justice Investors, said this is the wrong project for the neighborhood.

“It is not a question of blocking the views, it is the question of a 17-story high-rise that creates a shadow and significant traffic and parking problems,” he said. “A smaller, more reasonably sized campus, Justice Investors would support.”

The site is zoned for buildings with a maximum height of 65 feet, but Vincent Pan, executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action and a supporter of the project, said there are plenty of high-rises in the bordering Financial District just blocks away, next door to the Hilton.

“It really is the height of hypocrisy for them, with 30 stories, to say this tower is too tall and will cast a shadow,” said Pan, who has gathered 2,000 signatures in support of the project. “They have got a financial interest to try to protect their views. To me, it is an issue about immigrant rights … generations of immigrants and adult learners bettering their lives.”

Day said the 17-story structure is just a talking point, not a done deal.

“We have never said we are going to build a 17-story facility. It was all a what-if. You have to start somewhere,” Day said. “We are going through all of this effort to get community input which certainly should be sending the message to everybody that we are not stuck on this design.”

An environmental impact report on the project expected to be issued at the end of April will offer several alternatives, and plenty of opportunity for input before it is considered for approval in August, Day said. The college intends to begin construction on a campus in 2008.

Day said the approximately 6,500 students who will be served by the new campus will not all be there at the same time but will be on campus during day, night and weekend classes throughout the semester. Most are the same students who have already been taking classes in the Chinatown area at about 10 sites.

The 17-story building may be conceptual in Day’s mind, but the college’s architectural overview of the project paints a pretty clear picture of what opponents fear is coming their way.

According to the documents: “The new City College campus for Chinatown/North Beach collects all the functions of a college campus into one high-rise building which is intended to serve as a beacon of knowledge and learning. Feng shui principles guide the design.”

The documents show illustrations of the high-rise building and note it will contain 42 classrooms with language labs, science labs, computer training rooms and a culinary program.

The college’s Board of Trustees will discuss the proposal at their meeting tonight and the college administrators have set up two meetings in mid-April to solicit comment on the proposal from community leaders.

A long list of businesses and community organizations have signed on to oppose the high-rise, including the Chinatown Community Development Center, the Telegraph Hill Dwellers and the Chinatown Merchants Association.

This is not the first time the college has raised the ire of people in Chinatown. City College has been trying for about 10 years to build a satellite campus there to consolidate its 10 leased classroom sites and expand its programs beyond the mostly noncredit courses offered now. But its last effort just a few blocks away failed after the college was sued to stop it from displacing low-income elderly tenants and from destroying the historic Colombo Building.

Everybody would like to see a consolidated City College campus in Chinatown, said San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, but the college should have solicited more input from the community before unveiling a building that he said would be better suited to Shanghai than San Francisco.

“What is fundamentally disturbing is their consistent failure to reach out to the community in any way,” Peskin said. “They don’t seem to learn from their mistakes.”

Much of the concerns are about erecting a building that would cast shadows and close off the one remaining open air space around Portsmouth Square, a park that is teeming with playing children and elderly Chinese men and women playing Chinese chess and cards and taking in the sunshine and socializing.

“We are opposed to it. They should not build a structure like this. It would block the flow of air and light,” said Heragun Li, 91, who visits the park daily with his wife. “The old people all come here to socialize.”

Day said a shadow study conducted by the college found that its 17-story building would only cast a shadow for a little over an hour a day in the morning for a couple of weeks a year and that the Hilton shadows the area more significantly.

E-mail Tanya Schevitz at tschevitz@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/29/BAGOGOTSB01.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle